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Do you ever find yourself working on a spreadsheet and feeling like there must be a simpler way to go about things? I get it more than most.
As someone who is completely self-taught on Excel, I can guarantee that I have wasted just as many hours as you, going around the moon to meet the sun, just to make my spreadsheet work!
But 15 years into my Excel journey, I’ve picked up a few hints and tips to help skip over the everyday problems we all face.
In this week’s blog, I’ll share with you three of my all-time favourite data entry time-saving hacks, no self-respecting Excel user can be without (part 1). Fasten your seat belts! Your Excel skills are about to go supersonic!
1. Setting Today’s Date to a Cell, Automatically
Ask yourself, how often do you need to add a fixed 'today’s date' to your spreadsheet when entering data?
If it's a regular occurrence, how do you currently do this?
Chances are you do what so many others do and take a peep at the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, get typing, managing to mess up the placement of your forward slashes in at least one in ten attempts.
STOP
Simply click in a cell and use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + ; (semicolon) instead (see video below), then thank me later.
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2. Trailing Zero's When Typing in Numbers
I shared an Instagram reel about this just today (watch it here).
This trick will stop your number entries from losing their zeros!
For example, imagine you are compiling a list of (British) telephone numbers, all of which start with a zero.
If you type 01234567890 into a cell and hit enter, Microsoft Excel will return 1234567890.
It’s pretty annoying, right?
To fix this, simply type an apostrophe before your number:
Like this: ‘01234567890
Excel will keep the zero at the start for you. To remove the little green corner that's expressing a formula error, simply right-click and choose 'ignore error'.
Winning at life.
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3. Duplicate from Above
Let’s finish this first set of handy data entry hacks, by introducing you to another amazing keyboard shortcut...
CTRL + D
Imagine the scenario.
You’ve been entering a row of information into your spreadsheet. The next row immediately underneath has some small differences, but most of the data entries are identical to the row above.
Where this is the case, simply type CTRL +D and the data from immediately above will be duplicated into the active cell immediately below.
This video shows you what I mean:
Get in!
So there you have it.
Three super useful Excel hacks that will help you enter data so much more efficiently.
Look out for future posts where I’ll share even more of my go-to, non-negotiable essentials, to help you make the most of Microsoft Excel.
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